Continuing on with Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours):
The Medical Model fails most dramatically when we examine its success rate. It doesn't have one. The number of people who quit drinking as a result of going to a treatment centre is about 2 to 6 per cent. The Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step method works best for middle-aged, middle-class males who are prone to guilt and who are the first-born or only child. This is the method upon which most treatment centres rely. This is where the courts send people who are placed on probation orders or conditional sentences. This is where Indian Child and Family Services sends the parents of children they have apprehended as a condition to getting their children back. This is the solution that may of us recommend to our relatives when they ask us what they should do about their problem.
We frequently hear from our elected leaders that we need more treatment centres: we need treatment centres closer to our communities so that people don't have to travel so far, we need more treatment centers so that the waiting times are shorter. We have come to depend upon this one, single solution,and it doesn't work for 94 to 98 per cent of the people who either are sent there or who go there in one last attempt to get their lives back in order.
We have to find a better way. Somehow we have to turn our communities into treatment centres, so that the whole community becomes involved in finding healthy alternatives.
First, before someone snarks about spelling, I retained the Canadian rules spelling used in the book. Just to get the truly unimportant out of the way.
As I said, for those People for whom AA works, measuring in small numbers when considering them as a percent but, considering the large number of alcoholics, numbering in many, many thousands, it works. Considering the near total failure of the Medical Model in other cases, it is certainly worth it to keep and expand and study to see if ways can be found to make AA more effective for more people.
One of the most important things about AA is that it is free, none of the other Medical Model approaches is free. That becomes an entirely important thing for alcoholics who lose their jobs, lose their insurance, lose everything to their higher power, the ethyl alcohol molecule. But Harold Johnson is right, it isn't enough. We do need more effective ways to get people who generate problems with their drinking to stop. I strongly suspect, though, that the most effective means of lessening the burden of alcohol is to encourage people to never drink to start with. Alcohol consumption isn't something that is a constant, there have been enormous differences in abstinence over time and across different countries.
There is every reason to think it would be worth trying to find ways to encourage people to never drink, to not develop the habit and the addiction. That will, though, require the mass media, especially entertainment media, to stop presenting drinking as an expected, even required thing to be socially acceptable, unless they change that message, as well as stopping their promotion of propaganda likely sponsored by alcohol producers, nothing that will make this problem better will happen. Regulating alcohol at a level that will discourage drinking while minimizing the black marketing of liquor is probably important, too. Making it harder though not even that hard to get liquor is necessary.
Harold Johnson's proposal for making our communities treatment centers is something that can only work in very cohesive communities of people of a similar culture, he is addressing primarily, though not exclusively, First Nations Peoples communities. I don't think there is much prospect of this working among most other communities in North America, especially in cities and towns that are at all large and people move in and out and don't really have close connections with more than a small number of people, often living far from their family, if they have any.
As people spend more and more time online in front of screens, abandoning down-towns, abandoning the outdoors, that isolating effect will get worse. Some families living in the same house barely talk. For most of us, what forms our stories we imagine about ourselves, what informs our behavior will have to come from electronic media and, today, that by a wide margin favors alcohol use, a percentage of that rather amazingly in favor of getting everything from slightly buzzed to sloshed. I was astonished when I went online how many even highly educated younger adults, some in their thirties and forties, took binge drinking as normal and positive.
That pamphlet from the Center for Disease Control which I excerpted contained the rather startling fact that alcohol, which "science" as spread by the mass media determined was good for the heart does, in fact, cause heart disease. As it causes cancers, not only cancer of the liver and pancreas, as might be expected, but such cancers as breast cancer. The idea that moderate drinking is healthy - Harold Johnson's suspicion is that those studies are likely done on the liquor industry's money - is further erroded by the fact that just about everyone who is deemed to abuse liquor, who becomes an alcoholic, was, at one time, a moderate drinker. It also doesn't take into account that there is some damage to health by even moderate drinking, alcohol is a toxin and most alcoholic drinks have many, some of them quite unregulated, ingredients. I would bet you that the things that give whisky and bourbon their flavors are quite dangerous, in themselves. Your imaginary drinking man unwinding with a drink in front of the TV at the end of the day would probably be a lot better off with a nap. Or a walk. Or almost anything else that wasn't dangerous and poisonous.
But people need to be able to imagine themselves as not drinking before they can stop drinking. They have to be presented with those images.
Introducing characters and story lines that present sobriety as a positive thing would be novel for scribblers and directors and producers and is probably beyond their damaged, limited, to nonexistent imaginations. It would certainly be interesting to see how a good writer would do such an unusual thing in English literature, in any of the literatures I'm familiar with. There are many centuries of pro-drinking propaganda to go up against, made worse in the United States by TV free to present alcohol ads by the "freespeech" industry. Judges, "Justices" lawyers, they need to be made responsible for the results of their legal theories,
Update: I don't know why this is the only piece appearing on the page, I can't see anything different in the blog settings. If you want to see older stories you can click the older story link under this piece or use the index in the sidebar. I'll see if I can figure it out, if it's something I can fix.
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